Languid Hands
Detritus!
10 July – 8 September 2021 | Domino Houses Billboard, Bounds Green Road, N22 8YB
Languid Hands is a London-based artistic and curatorial collaboration between Rabz Lansiquot, filmmaker, programmer and DJ, and Imani Robinson, interdisciplinary writer, editor and live artist.
Detritus! is a composite image made up of stills from Languid Hands’ 2019 film Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer / Protest / Peace, which examines the extent to which Black Testimony is obscured, ignored and undermined. Drawing on archival imagery, Black geographies, and the dying declarations of Black Martyrs, the film explores the complexities of truth, empathy, justice, the law, life and death for the Black Mass.
The film borrows its subtitle – Prayer, Protest, Peace - from the third track on jazz drummer and composer Max Roach's 1960 album ‘We Insist! Freedom Now Suite’ which features jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Using this composition as the underlying structure for the film itself, Languid Hands present three chapters or mediations on death and dying and consider the im/possibility of Black Testimony. The script draws from a variety of well and lesser known black texts, weaving the audience through a performative speech written and delivered by Robinson, carefully annotated by Lansiquot's archival exploration and sound mixed by sound artist and friend of Languid Hands, Felix Taylor.
Detritus! is a latticework of fragments and distortions. Images of Notting Hill Carnival are layered and manipulated, as bodies and histories are. Ancestral logics are thrust against carceral geography, an antagonistic expression of wayward explorations. The work draws the eye into proximity, the bygone heat of closeness, the labouring of the body, flesh as the site, the forum, as sovereign territory... that which sweats, pours... extracting fragmentary gestures, the memory of an opening, movement as mourning, a meditation on the mind's eye. Protest: as in, where will you be? As in, who the hell set it up like this? And what is everyone being so reasonable about?
Sounding Sites: A Sonic Testimony
Tuesday 27 July 2021, 2-3pm
www.threadsradio.com
A Sonic Testimony is the first exclusively aural iteration of Languid Hands' ongoing project Towards A Black Testimony, bringing together text, sound and music from the expansive archive of Black culture and resistance. Towards A Black Testimony is an artistic and curatorial project which examines the extent to which Black Testimony is obscured, ignored and undermined and explores the complexities of truth, empathy, justice, the law, life and death for the Black Mass.
Languid Hands is a London-based artistic and curatorial collaboration between Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson. Thier work is informed by ongoing explorations in Black and queer studies, Black creative practice, Black liberatory praxis and queer methodologies. They began collaborating in 2015, through the collective sorryyoufeeluncomfortable (SYFU), programming in a variety of institutions and community spaces in the UK and Europe, co-curating the BBZBLKBK Alternative Graduate Show 2018 and (BUT) WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY?, a group exhibition at Many Studios as part of Glasgow International Festival 2018. In 2019, they made their first collaborative film Towards A Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace which was commissioned by Jerwood Arts for the group exhibition Jerwood Collaborate!, and exhibited at Stroom Den Haag alongside acurated public programme. They also curated away, completely: denigrate, a group exhibition at narrative projects, Fitzrovia, in 2019. They are currently the Cubitt Curatorial Fellows, presenting a programme entitled No Real Closure which showcases the work of 5 Black British artists in exhibitions alongside programming and the establishment of Curatorial Tactics, a network of Black curators.
